[The following is a guest post by David Sim, lecturer in U.S. history at University College London.] Just over a half-century ago, Walter LaFeber published an expanded version of his doctoral dissertation as The New Empire: an Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898.[i] In it, LaFeber told a story about the evolution of American foreign policy in the late nineteenth century. Summarising his argument for the book’s thirty-fifth anniversary republication, LaFeber emphasised four key contributions. First, he argued that “important continuities marked the years from 1865 to 1898.” Second, “economic transformations” – and the way that policymakers understood them – “were Read more